Owens, trying to stop poachers from killing elephants and other wildlife, turned their base camp into “the command center for anti-poaching operations” - which Ms. The Owenses later became renowned for their foundation’s work in Zambia, where they provided job training, microloans, health care and education to villagers. They set up a research camp in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, where they spent their days closely observing lions and hyenas, studying their migration patterns and social behavior. In 1974, she and her husband at the time, Mark Owens, set off to study wildlife in Africa. Inspired by Jane Goodall, she studied zoology at the University of Georgia and later got her doctorate in animal behavior from the University of California, Davis.
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Owens spent most of her free time outside in the woods. “It’s about trying to make it in a wild place,” she said.įor most of her life, she lived as far away from people and as close to wild animals as she could get. Owens said she drew on her experience living in the wilderness, cut off from society. “I never really thought I could write a novel,” she said. No one seems more caught off guard by the book’s success than Ms. “Once it took off, it fed on itself and it’s been remarkably resilient,” said Kristen McLean, the executive director of business development at the NPD Group. Merriam-Webster added “crawdad” to its list of the top 10 words of 2019, noting that searches for “crawdad” on its online dictionary spiked by 1,200 percent this year. The combination of word-of-mouth buzz and the novel’s prominence on the best-seller list set off a self-fulfilling cycle: The book’s visibility drove sales, and sales drove visibility. We like to have a comparison title so that we can do sales forecasts, but in this case none of the comparisons work.” “I’ve never seen anything like this in 30 years,” said Jaci Updike, president of sales for Penguin Random House, who has overseen strategies for best sellers like “The Da Vinci Code,” “The Girl on the Train” and “Gone Girl.” “This book has broken all the friggin’ rules. One of the most surprising things about the success of “Crawdads” is that sales began to accelerate months after it came out - an anomaly in publishing, where sales typically peak just after publication, aided by the initial advertising and marketing around a title. Owens on Instagram this year.īut even those factors fail to fully account for why the book took off as it did, and continues to sell so robustly. The novel also got an early boost from independent booksellers, who widely recommended it, and from the actress Reese Witherspoon, who selected “Crawdads” for her book club and plans to produce a feature film adaptation of the novel, and appeared in a bubbly video with Ms. The plot seemed tailored to appeal to a wide audience, with its combination of murder mystery, lush nature writing, romance and a coming-of-age survival story. But “Crawdads” had several things going for it.
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Like the movie industry, publishing has become a winner-take-all business, with a handful of blockbusters commanding all the attention and sales, so surprise breakout hits have become increasingly rare. “I have never connected with people the way I have with my readers,” she said in an interview. Foreign rights have sold in 41 countries. Putnam has returned to the printers nearly 40 times to feed a seemingly bottomless demand for the book. It’s an astonishing trajectory for any debut novelist, much less for a reclusive, 70-year-old scientist, whose previous published works chronicled the decades she spent in the deserts and valleys of Botswana and Zambia, where she studied hyenas, lions and elephants.Īs the end of 2019 approaches, “Crawdads” has sold more print copies than any other adult title this year - fiction or nonfiction - according to NPD BookScan, blowing away the combined print sales of new novels by John Grisham, Margaret Atwood and Stephen King. The book, which had an odd title and didn’t fit neatly into any genre, hardly seemed destined to be a blockbuster, so Putnam printed about 28,000 copies.Ī year and a half later, the novel, “ Where the Crawdads Sing,” an absorbing, atmospheric tale about a lonely girl’s coming-of-age in the marshes of North Carolina, has sold more than four and a half million copies. In the summer of 2018, Putnam published an unusual debut novel by a retired wildlife biologist named Delia Owens.
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